10 Years Ago, a Different Plane Hit a Different Manhattan Skyscraper

But you probably haven't heard the story of Cory Lidle.

By
Ross Barkan

Oct 11, 2016

Getty ImagesElsa

Ten years ago today, Cory Lidle died. If you aren't a diehard baseball fan, that sentence probably means nothing to you. Lidle was a pitcher like Jose Fernandez, the spectacular Miami Marlin who was killed in a boating accident last month, but his death has been long forgotten. He was 34, not 24, and he wasn't blessed with Fernandez's Hall of Fame fastball or flair. His career was ending, not beginning. He was a league average pitcher at best, bouncing between seven teams in nine seasons.

On October 11, 2006, a small airplane flew into a high-rise residential building on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Lidle and his flight instructor, the only two people aboard, were killed instantly. Lidle left behind a wife and a 6-year-old son. The National Transportation Safety Board said the probable cause was pilot error, though it never determined who was flying the plane, which Lidle owned.

In baseball, where words like "immortal" are used to describe mortal men and fans celebrate the absence of a clock, the intrusion of death can be particularly jarring, but the reaction to Lidle's death was relatively mild. Fernandez's death was compared to Thurman Munson's, the beloved Yankee catcher who died in a 1979 plane crash at the age of 32. Lidle's death was something else. Yankee players didn't wear his number on the back of their jerseys, like the Marlins did for Fernandez. There were no Sports Illustrated encomiums or sportscasters sobbingon air. Hillary Clinton, then a senator from New York, didn't pay tribute.

Lidle was a nomadic pitcher who never had time to build up much affection with any one fan base. And he was not a grinning, buoyant ballplayer beloved throughout the game. He was headstrong, chastising stars like Barry Bonds for using steroids, and never hesitating to attack teammates he felt weren't hustling. After he was traded from the Philadelphia Phillies, he said that on the days he pitched it was "almost a coin flip as to know if the guys behind me are going to be there to play 100 percent." Many players hated him because he was a scab during the 1994 strike that canceled the World Series; he was permanently barred from joining the union. As a result, you can't play as Cory Lidle in old video games.

The building where Lidle's plane crashed on October 11, 2006

Getty ImagesAndrew Savulich

Lidle's final act as a pitcher was surrendering three runs in an inning and a third in a playoff game that eliminated the Yankees on October 7. He enraged fans and the media when he claimed the Detroit Tigers, the winning team, were a "little more ready to play than we were," a comment interpreted as a dig at Yankees manager Joe Torre. One of Lidle's loudest critics was Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, the co-host of WFAN's Mike and the Mad Dog, a popular afternoon show that had become a trendsetter for sports talk radio across America. Russo, no fan of Lidle's since he arrived in a midseason trade, ripped him after the series, and the pitcher called into the show, telling the duo he was just trying to "enjoy my day" in New York when he heard he was being criticized. "No Yankee fan should enjoy the day in New York," Russo shot back. "If I'm a Yankee I'm in hiding. I'm not enjoying a day in New York."

"What am I supposed to do, go cry in my apartment for the next two weeks? Is that what I'm supposed to do?" Lidle asked.

Two days later, he was dead.

He was not a grinning, buoyant ballplayer beloved throughout the game.

Russo found out about Lidle's death that afternoon, while sitting at a rain-soaked Shea Stadium awaiting a New York Mets playoff game that would eventually be postponed. "Weird" was the word he kept using when I called to ask about his memories of the experience a decade later. "It was a very, very tricky situation. Ten years ago, I felt very weird about it, I felt very bad about it," Russo said. "Guilt? There probably was." (Mike and the Mad Dog broke up in 2008; Francesa has a colorless solo show on WFAN while Russo runs his own channel on Sirius XM Radio. Francesa declined to comment.)

"You're doing a show at Shea Stadium, it's pouring rain, it's a terrible tragedy," Russo continued. "We're in an empty ballpark with a major storm. Three hours ago Cory Lidle had a plane accident. That's weird."

But Russo said the tragedy didn't change his perspective on players like Lidle, who can shrug off losses that gall their fan bases. "When athletes make light—and Lidle was only on the Yankees for two months, it wasn't like he was a long-time Yankee for 15 years—when athletes basically tone down and try to lessen the impact of a series, that always has bothered me," he said.

When the most talented and unblemished die, like Fernandez, the public mourning is rather simple: you bemoan the loss of such ability and wonder what could've been. For inferior players and complicated people, the narrative is never so easy. In Bang the Drum Slowly, the elegiac baseball novel-turned-movie, star pitcher Henry Wiggen must cope with the death of the team's backup catcher, a forgettable country boy named Bruce Pearson. "He wasn't a bad fella," Wiggen reflects, walking through a graveyard. "No worse than most, and probably better than some. And not a bad ballplayer neither, when they gave him a chance."

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